Personal/political musings from a Canadian activist and writer. From May 2004 to July 2005, when the author lived in the U.S., the site was known as A Canadian Lefty in the Land of King George. Here are a few words about the current name.

Monday, February 12, 2018

In my first post of the year, back on January 1, I declared an intent to try writing blog posts that were more frequent and casual, often starting from Twitter threads.
I have been very pleased with that new practice. I've kept it up, mostly. I'm not as good at making them casual as I might like, but I've managed to write a range of kinds of things and to do it all in a way that connects, a little or a lot, to other things I'm working on. It feels both useful in multiple ways and pleaureable. So less-than-daily, more-than-weekly, quick, casual blogging is a practice I intend to maintain.

That said, it's a practice I intend to suspend for the next six weeks or so.

I'm going to be travelling for a couple of weeks in March. I have a separate mix of ambivalences about the travelling itself, which I may eventually write about, though I'm sure there will also be lots to enjoy. Of more immediate relevance, however, is that when you live with a rolling weekly deadline, as I do for Talking Radical Radio, two weeks in which no work whatsoever can happen necessitates a great deal of advance preparation and hassle. I'm actually in okay shape – not yet out of the woods, but on a good path – in terms of ensuring I'll have all of the interviews I need when I need them. But it's also going to require doubling up on the most time consuming element of doing the show, which is editing, for a period of a few weeks. So as of tomorrow, more or less, I'll be doing double my usual daily amount of radio editing.

As well, in the January 1 post I mentioned a major re-orientation of a book project that I've been intermittently working on for a few years. I say a little more about that as well in the first paragraph of this post. Since the new year, that has mostly involved doing a bunch of reading (as well as some exploratory writing), some quite similar to what I would be doing anyway, and some rather new. My goal is to have done enough of that to be able to make some further decisions by the end of March. And it has been happening, but unfortunately it has not been happening as quickly as I'd like.

Which means that along with double radio in the next few weeks (and no radio at all while I'm on the road, other than some social media promo stuff), I will be doing extra reading over all of that time. As a consequence, I don't think I'll have time to do any writing, or at least not any that will be seen by eyes other than mine. There are a couple of points where I might try to sneak a post in...but I won't have time that I can count on for doing writing of that sort until the last week of March.

All of which I say less because I think too many people who aren't me will be fussed one way or the other, but more as a way of making clear to myself that this will be a no-writing tunnel that will have a distinct and clear light at its end.

And now, off I go to begin mapping the interview for next week's episode of Talking Radical Radio. Well, first I'll cook dinner. Then the mapping begins... :)